Candyman

Candyman is the best American horror film of the nineties and it is about gentrification, academia and whose stories get believed.

Rose's structure is a trap for its own protagonist. Helen Lyle is writing a thesis on urban legends and she treats Cabrini-Green as fieldwork: she drives in, photographs a derelict flat, tape-records the residents, and tells a woman whose neighbour was murdered through a hole in the bathroom wall that the killer was almost certainly a man rather than a ghost. She is right about the murder and completely wrong about everything else, and the film's cruellest observation is that the thing she is studying needs her — Candyman tells her directly that he exists because he is believed in, and that an academic debunking him is a threat to his existence in a way that a police investigation is not.

Virginia Madsen is remarkable in it, playing curiosity as a kind of trespass, and Tony Todd's Candyman is the most physically commanding monster in American horror: six foot five, unhurried, speaking in a voice pitched for a cathedral, and entirely without malice in his manner. He never shouts. He explains.

Philip Glass's score is doing something unusual

Glass wrote it for pipe organ, piano and choir, believing he was scoring an art film, and the result — stately, liturgical, almost beautiful — refuses to tell you that what you are watching is frightening. It is the single biggest reason the film feels like a tragedy rather than a slasher.

Cabrini-Green is filmed as a place rather than a set

Rose shot in the real buildings with residents on screen, and the film is specific about the material facts: identical floor plans, a wall of plasterboard between a medicine cabinet and the flat next door, no police response, gang control of stairwells, and a block of flats put up for people whose previous neighbourhood was demolished. Helen's own apartment building, as the film points out, is the same architecture converted into condominiums.

Where it is weak

The first act's academic satire is broad. Trevor is a cipher. And the film's handling of Bernadette, who exists largely to be killed, is the clearest case of the genre's worst habit in an otherwise careful film.

For Barker's own prose version and the collection it comes from, Books of Blood; for Barker's other great screen adaptation of the period, Hellraiser; for the modern film that took up its argument about race and American horror, Get Out.

The short answer: Helen, having lost her reputation, her husband and her liberty — framed for Bernadette's murder and for abducting Anne-Marie's baby, and confined to a psychiatric ward — is released and finds that Candyman has taken the child to the enormous bonfire the residents have built in the Cabrini-Green courtyard. She goes into the pyre for him. She finds Anthony, fights Candyman inside the fire, and gets the baby out through a gap in the wood as the whole structure collapses. She dies of her burns in front of the residents; Candyman is destroyed with her. Her funeral is attended by the people of Cabrini-Green, who walk past her grave and drop Candyman's hook into it. In the last scene, Trevor — now living with the student he left Helen for — stands at the bathroom mirror and says Helen's name five times. She appears behind him, and kills him.

Who is Candyman?

Daniel Robitaille, the son of an enslaved woman who became wealthy enough to educate him, and who became a successful portrait painter in the late nineteenth century. Commissioned by a Chicago landowner to paint his daughter, he and she fell in love and she became pregnant. Her father hired men who cut off Robitaille's right hand with a rusty blade, smeared him with honeycomb taken from an apiary so that he was stung to death by the bees, and burned his body on a pyre, scattering the ashes over the ground where Cabrini-Green was later built.

How does the Candyman legend work?

Say his name five times into a mirror and he appears behind you with a hook where his right hand was. The film's central idea, which Candyman states himself, is that he is sustained by belief rather than by ritual: the murders are how the story is kept alive, and the story is how he continues to exist. Helen's thesis — that the Cabrini-Green killings have a human culprit — is therefore an attack on him, and that is why he comes for her specifically.

Is Candyman real in the film, or is Helen the killer?

Rose builds the first half so that a rational reading is fully available: Helen has no alibi for Bernadette's death, she is found covered in blood with the baby, and the hospital psychiatrist's account of her is entirely coherent. The film then closes the option. Candyman appears to the psychiatrist and kills him in front of a security camera, and the final scene with Trevor requires him to be real. The ambiguity is a structure rather than a conclusion.

Does Helen become Candyman?

She becomes something like him. The final scene mirrors the film's own rules exactly: a name spoken five times into a mirror, an appearance behind the speaker, a killing. The difference is in who she goes for — Trevor, who betrayed her and let her be committed — and in what the residents did at her funeral. The sequels take her in a particular direction; the 1992 film leaves her as a new legend with one murder to her name and a community that honours her.

What is Cabrini-Green?

A real Chicago public housing development on the Near North Side, built in stages from the 1940s, which by the time the film was made had become a byword for neglect, violence and official abandonment. Rose shot in it with the cooperation of residents, and the film's plot is built on a documented architectural fact: the flats' medicine cabinets backed onto thin partition walls that could be broken through from the next unit. Cabrini-Green was demolished in stages and the last tower came down in 2011.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Viscera 060 is above the median — 73 works score lower. A disembowelling with a hook, a severed hand in flashback, a dog's head, a bee-covered body, a psychiatrist opened at a desk, and two deaths by fire.

Tone 018 is bleak — 47 works score lower. The protagonist loses her work, her marriage and her freedom, saves a baby, dies in a fire, and becomes the thing she was investigating.

Era bias 026 reads analog — 39 works score lower. 1992 35mm, a pipe-organ score recorded live, real Chicago locations and practical bee work.

Reality anchor 058 leans towards dream logic — 59 works score lower. Helen loses days, wakes in places she did not travel to, and the film declines to show the transitions.

The threat at 038 is on the supernatural side — 53 works score lower, although the film is pointed about the fact that everything done to Daniel Robitaille was done by men.

Pace 040 sits just on the dread side — 56 works are slower. The murders are widely spaced and the film spends most of its time on research.

On jump scares: several, and the mirror-cabinet sequence is the best of them.